


Want Of A Nail

by MizDazey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:00:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29558781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MizDazey/pseuds/MizDazey
Summary: For the want of a nail, the shoe was lostFor the want of a shoe, the horse was lostFor the want of a horse, the battle was lostFor the want of a battle, the Kingdom was lostAll for the want of a horse-shoe nail.But what if the nail was never lost in the first place?Alternatively, at the Welcome Feast in First Year, when Snape looks at Harry, he sees.
Comments: 4





	Want Of A Nail

The cheer that reverberated up to the glimmering rafters of the Great Hall when the musty hat shouted _GRYFFINDOR_ was fucking ear-splitting. _Perfect,_ Harry thought, as he climbed stiffly off the stool, handing the Hat back to Professor McGonagall, _just perfect. That’s definitely how to make friends, you little arsehole, showing off, tricking all these people into thinking you’re important, or something._ He still wasn’t entirely sure why everyone at the Gryffindor table seemed prepared to _like_ him so much - he slipped into the first open bench-space he saw, studiously ignoring the fact that several older and taller students jostled each other to make space for him to sit with them. 

He sat quietly as the Hat ran through the remaining students, though he did clap like a lunatic when “Weasley, Ronald” joined the Gryffindor table. They grinned at each other as Ron slid into a seat a few places away and across from a dark-haired girl, both of them clearly giddy with relief to have that over with, and thankful it was nowhere near as painful as Ron’s brother had forewarned. 

Harry’s whole body felt lit up with nerves and uncertainty, and maybe a feeling that was a cousin of excitement - a distant relation perhaps, unsure of itself or its reception. Everything was just so _interesting_. Hundreds of softly-glowing candles floated above their heads, and the ceiling itself roiled with crow-black clouds and gusty winds, but not a drop of rain fell. Harry could feel his jaw threatening to drop as he darted glances upwards, and he consciously forced himself to keep a smile on his face, teeth clenched, so he didn’t gawp about like an idiot. _No one seems bothered by any of this fucking magic just, happening, around us_ , he mused dryly. Harry’d seen the cascade of letters shoot down the chimney at Privet Drive; he’d seen the moving Chocolate Frog picture cards and the spell that the Hermione girl had done to his glasses, and the self-propelling boats and the Hat that could fucking talk and apparently read minds, and yes, that was obviously all incredible, but the fact that hundreds of kids sat calmly and uncaring as literal fire floated above their heads - now that was magic. 

Harry snapped back to attention at the order to _tuck in_ , and couldn't stop himself from gasping as the polished wooden table in front of him suddenly _blinked_ out and _blinked_ back in, now laden with steaming, fragrant platters of food. His stomach groaned in sympathy-hunger as he caught a sniff of spiced sausages, and then clenched, so much that he dropped a hand under the table to cup it. Never in his life had he seen this much food - not even the lavish spread Aunt Petunia set out for Christmas dinner rivaled the three or so feet of table within his reach. More to the point, never in his life had he been invited to _eat_ this much food. Harry knew, personally, how much work it took to peel and mash multiple pounds of potatoes, and his fingers ached in phantom pain for the person who had made the gigantic pile of mashed potatoes sitting at his left elbow. 

Around and across from him, his new House-mates feasted with enthusiasm, poking at their friends to pass them platters of dressed turkey and griddled bread, seemingly unsurprised by the bounty of their dinner, or by the Herculean effort it must have taken to make it. _Jesus, Harry_ , he thought to himself, just a little stricken at the fact that even though Aunt Petunia wasn’t physically there to send him from the kitchen without dinner, he apparently had immediately taken on her job of denying him. _Just eat the damn food._

His hands felt oddly heavy, but he forked sausages and roasted parsnips and a giant buttery roll onto the gilt-edged plate in front of him, and, for just a moment, let himself luxuriate in the burst of flavors and fat on his tongue as he devoured them. 

Initially, the only sounds in the Great Hall had been the scraping of forks and the clink of pitchers being set back on the tables, but as the students made their way through their first servings of dinner, the conversational mumble grew in both volume and fervor. 

Harry could hear the Gryffindors around him catching each other up on their summer hols and family gossip, and a small, secret part of him yearned to be able to fold himself into their conversational ebb and flow, that he had a joke or a stupid story to contribute; that he would be welcomed. 

But what would he even say? "Hi, I’m Harry, I’d love it if you didn’t stick my head in the toilets the way boys at the school I’m supposed to be at are wont to do - the school I was supposed to be at until owls started dropping letters written in emerald-green ink on my doorstop." _And_ , he thought, rather wildly, _do they even have toilets here? How does the whole bathroom situation even work in a castle, let alone a magical castle? Who cleans them? Would he be expected to do it? Are the cleaners and cooks actually talking clocks and wardrobes and teacups like in Beauty and the Beast? The Hat was alive, more or less - is fucking EVERYTHING alive?_ Horror struck, Harry set his knife and fork down gently on his empty plate, peering intently at the fork tines to see if he could see a tiny mouth or eyes.

He could feel a prickle of sensation on the back of his neck, and sharply-honed instincts sang out that he was being watched. A little abashed, he abandoned his scrutiny of his utensils, and hurriedly wiped at his mouth with his napkin, as if he’d dropped his cutlery onto his plate like a normal person, and not one who was afraid he’d been eating with Mr. Fork and Mrs. Knife. 

He looked up, and caught the eye of the boy next to him - a tallish, slightly gawky red-head, with thick glasses perched pertly on an upturned nose. 

“Alright there, Harry?” the boy asked officiously, fully turning in his seat to extend his hand for a handshake. Harry, supremely conscious that he had sausage-grease on his fingertips, reluctantly shook hands. 

“Percy Weasley, here, Fifth Year, _Prefect_ ,” he said, with a tiny quirk of his lips. “I see you’ve been enjoying yourself - the kitchen always does a bang up job on Feast days. Good, very good to see.” 

Harry wasn’t stupid - he knew what a Prefect was - Aunt Petunia favored those sort of telly programs about milk-skinned English boys faffing about at boarding school in the country - but he thought this particular Prefect might be taking his role a bit too seriously. 

Nevertheless, at least someone was talking to him, which was better than the alternative of no one talking to him, so he smiled tentatively at Percy, who grinned blindingly back. The grin looked familiar…and Harry stupidly, finally twigged on. 

“Oh! I met your brother, on the train. Ron?” 

“Yes, yes, Ron, youngest in the family, save for our sister, she’ll be here next year, and gratifying to see he’s made Gryffindor, it’s been Gryffindor for the lot of us.” Even sitting down, perfectly still, Percy gave off an air of bustling about. Harry’d never met someone so suited to being named “Percy.” 

But here was a source of information that _clearly_ would be happy to explain things to him - he’d be a fool not to take advantage of it. 

He opened his mouth, head lifted towards the four House banners hung over the staff table, intensely curious about what, exactly, the Hat meant by “brave and true,” as he was pretty certain neither adjective applied to himself, yet here he was. 

Percy followed the train of his eyes, but apparently not the train of his thoughts, and immediately plunged into a professor roll call. 

“Obviously that’s Professor Dumbledore, Headmaster, greatest wizard of our age, and next to him is Professor McGonagall, though you’ve met her of course. Deputy Headmistress, teaches Transfiguration.”

Harry burned to ask what on God’s green earth they were going to learn in Transfiguration - he had a wild impression of Calvin and Hobbes and McGonagall peering down her nose at him as he crawled out of a cardboard box with “Transmorgification” scrawled on the side, and he hoped his idiot thought didn’t show on his face. 

Nonplussed, and unsurprisingly, Percy had continued talking. “…dueling champion he is, don’t let the small stature fool you, and he can take a rather hard line about spell-casting forms. Oh, and to his left is Professor Sinistra, teaches Astronomy, she’ll have you up on the parapets once a week tracking lunar movements. Now, don’t mistake me, it’s a bit of a soft subject, but the applications will be very useful for electives like Advanced Runes, so don’t neglect it.” Percy shook his head, regretfully. 

“If I only could go back in time to my welcome feast, I’d tell my younger self to take it a bit more seriously, make no mistake.” 

Harry’s eyes jumped two spots down from Professor Sinistra, to a man with hunched shoulders and an eggplant-colored turban swathed about the back and top of his head. _It really was a ludicrously large turban_ , Harry mused. _It must knock him quite off balance._

And he didn’t even have to ask; Percy had barely paused his recitation to even draw breath. 

“And, of course, that’s Professor Quirrell, Defense, he’s a noted theorist but he’s been abroad for a number of years, only recently returned to Britain. I’m looking forward to really digging my teeth into the theory, some of our past Defense professors have leaned a bit too far into the practical for my taste, honestly.” 

_Defense_ against what, exactly, Harry wondered. The professors? Each other? Monsters? Shit, if fucking  magic was real, were magical beasts and creatures  real? Was that why Uncle Vernon had flat out refused to let Dudley be a vampire for Halloween last year - maybe the first time in his life Dudley’d ever been told _no_. Was that why he’d reacted, the way that he did, when he found the drawings of a flying motorbike tacked up in Harry’s cupboard? Harry, backside smarting after Uncle Vernon had shoved him back in the now-bare cupboard when he was through with him, had assumed that his uncle was angry that Harry had nicked Dudley’s crayons, but now, seated on a bench in an enchanted fucking castle, Harry maybe understood why his uncle had been so violently leery of anything that smacked of magic. 

_Guess he couldn’t smack it out of me_ , he mused absently, looking over Quirrell’s shoulder at the professor across the table from him. He’d just caught a glimpse of a long, hooked nose and even longer black hair, when the scar on his forehead suddenly pulsed painfully, like a tiny electric shock that shot outwards down the back of his neck and settled directly behind his eyes. It felt like he’d been slapped - a brisk backhand across his jaw and temple, forcing his eyes to snap shut and water involuntarily. 

He dropped his head towards his plate, cursing himself for making eye contact like that, what, did he think the rules had somehow changed just because he wasn’t physically on Privet Drive, physically within arm's reach of Uncle Vernon? He hoped that no one noticed that he was tearing up like a pathetic little baby. 

Dimly, he heard Percy still fucking talking above him, but it was like Percy was shouting at him through a muffling layer of cotton wool, and only one word in every five registered. 

“Snape…bit harsh…don’t want to accuse…some bias…still…past master.”

Harry clenched his fingers in his lap, deliberately digging his nails into his palms, letting the stinging pain center him, even as his scar burned faintly and his eyes ached. 

"Harry? Harry, are you quite alright?” 

Harry refused to let himself flinch at the companionable arm Percy draped over his shoulder, and gathered himself to reply, hoping he could scrape up a reassuring smile, when a two-tone chime pierced the air. 

Apparently, it was a signal for something, because Percy abruptly leapt to his feet, Harry clearly forgotten, in the excruciating pleasure of performing Prefecture. 

"First Years! First Years, to me!” He lifted both arms over his head, waving his wand wildly, as if any of them could possibly miss him or be confused by his bombastic shout. 

Harry was so grateful that he could hide himself in the commotion and chaos of hustling the First Years through the castle and to the Gryffindor dormitories. Vaguely, he was aware that the staircase they were on _moved_ entirely on its own at some point, and that the people in the frankly millions of paintings hung all about were shouting and waving at them, but all his attention was given to putting one foot in front of the other, navigating through half-closed and aching eyes. 

The dormitory was something of a revelation - the high, four-poster beds hung with scarlet bed curtains looked like something a king would sleep on, not a scrawny little nobody like him, but the bathroom situation (contrary to his earlier wild thoughts) was reassuringly mundane and essentially exactly what he was used to. 

_I wonder if wizards or Muggles invented toilets_ , he thought to himself, as he hung his robes up in the wardrobe by his bed, surprised to find that his clothes and other robes had been removed from his trunk and tidily stored away. He spared a passing thought for the poor cleaner that had apparently shelved his ratty underwear and t-shirts, before closing the wardrobe door and starting to turn down the bed. 

He could hear his new Housemates, Dean and the Irish one whose name he hadn’t caught, talking quietly behind him, but the portly boy with the frog had disappeared behind his bed curtains without even a whispered “good night.” Across the room, he could see Ron fiddling with the school supplies in his trunk, and he desperately knew that he should go over and chat, to see if they could fall back into the easy camaraderie they’d developed on the train, but his head burned and his eyes felt like they were weighted down with cement. He wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed, behind the unlooked for but fucking welcome privacy of the bed curtains, and try to make _sense_ of every weird and wonderful that had happened to him today. 

So, instead, he grinned at Ron - a true smile, hoping to convey just how unbelievably lucky they were to be here, and, thank god, got an answering grin in return. Mollified, and hopeful, Harry tipped himself into the nest of pillows crowning his bed, closed his aching eyes, and slept. 

**Author's Note:**

> As an over-arching note, JKR's opinions about TERFs and trans folks are wrong-headed garbage and frankly, massively disappointing. So, if she gets to ret-con the shit out of the HP universe, then so do we all. 
> 
> This inspiration for this comes from a short story called "Puppy" in George Saunders' incredible collection "Tenth of December" (and honestly, close out of my feeble faint imitation and go read "Tenth of December" it's so brilliant.) Anyway, in "Puppy" a middle class mom (who grew up in an impoverished and abusive situation) goes out to a rural area to get a puppy for her kids, and sees a little boy tied to a tree with a dog bowl in front of him. She's horrified, and she thinks to herself, essentially, "commiserating looks that promise that "it well get better" are all well and good and the stuff of bad afternoon show specials, but a crisp and detailed call to Mrs. Bledsoe down at Child Services will actually effect some very needed change in this kid's life." Somehow, that = Harry Potter canon re-write, I guess. 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoy. This fic is complete, but for final editing, which for me means sometimes moving stuff around, so I didn't want to commit to a chapter count. It will be updated on Fridays. 
> 
> I'd love to hear what you think!


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